25 June 2009

Two And A Half Hot Dogs

2108.Despite what the title implies, this is not a discourse regarding the interesting food at the 12th and Hawthorne cart pod, nor is it about a new series starring Charlie Sheen and Jon Fryer about running a streetside food cart. It is, in fact, about logos.

Many logos have nicknames or even official names. General Electric's classic logo is known, somewhat inaccurately, as "The Monogram" officially, and Bank of America's design which appears to resemble a cross between and American flag and an aerial view of farmland is officially called "The Flagscape".

NASA insiders and fans alike know that the minimalist logo used from 1975 to 1992 is known as "The Worm" whereas the classic logo used before and after that time (and which graces my coffee cup) is known as "The Meatball", though those are both colloquial. There are other meatballs as well: The GE logo, officially called The Monogram in-house, is colloqually called by some The Meatball, and the old Continental Airlines logo, used from the late 60s to sometime in the 90s, was also called The Meatball.


A meatball by any other name. Via.

Other amusing ones are The Venetian Blinds for the classic blue-striped version of the IBM logo designed by Paul Rand; The Bocce Ball for the new Xerox logo; and The Coffee Stain for the Zen-insipred logo of Lucent (lampooned in Dilbert as "The Brown Ring of Quality").

Oh, and the "two-and-a-half-hotdogs?" It's this:


Meatballs and hotdogs – I'm feeling hungry. Via.

Read more at the post that inspired me to comment, here on Identity Works.

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2 comments:

vespabelle said...

my NASA-engineer dad's joke was that if you turned the worm logo upside down, the intials (VSVN) stood for "Very Soon Virtually Nothing."

Samuel John Klein said...

LOL! That's mad clever. I've always liked the engineer's brand of humor.